Re: [PATCH] for-each-ref: introduce color format

On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 9:55 PM, Ramkumar Ramachandra
[off-list ref] wrote:

You can now do something like

$ git for-each-ref --format='%C(red)%(refname:short)%C(reset)
%C(blue)%(upstream:diff)%C(reset)' --count 5 --sort='-committerdate'
refs/heads

To get output that's much more customizable 'git branch' output.  Future
patches will attempt unify the semantics of 'git branch' and 'git
for-each-ref'.

Signed-off-by: Ramkumar Ramachandra <redacted>
---
 So my evil plan is to keep extending this format until it's on par
 with pretty-formats.  Then, we can move towards unifying 'git branch'
 and 'git for-each-ref'.  This will involve deprecating badly
 thought-out options like '-v', and replacing it with the more
 powerful '--format'.

 I just have one major doubt: in the above output, how do I align all
 the upstream branches to the same column?  How can I achieve it with
 pretty-formats?  Something like %*d?  But * is already taken to mean
 deref in for-each-ref's --format.

 By the way, the main motivation for all this comes from the fact that
 git for-each-ref is very nicely written :) Look at how it breaks
 everything up into atoms and lazily gets the information it needs to
 display.

If you can put energy into this, I suggest you improve pretty.c a bit,
adding new format_ref_message(), similar to format_commit_message(),
except that it takes a ref. You can extend "struct
format_commit_context" to contain what "struct refinfo" does. I think
pretty.c only lacks a few specifiers that for-each-ref has. I think I
mentioned it in my for-each-ref series already, but we need to think
how to specify "align to the left with the best width" and how
format_ref_message() can figure the width out. A callback function
might do.
--
Duy